Geographies of Home

by Loida Maritza Pérez

Book Overview

After leaving the college she'd attended to escape her religiously conservative parents, Iliana, a first-generation Dominican-American woman, returns home to Brooklyn to find that her family is falling apart- one sister is careening toward mental collapse, another sister is living in a decrepit building with her abusive husband and three children, and a third sister has simply disappeared. In this dislocating urban environment Iliana reluctantly confronts...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140253718
• ISBN13: 9780140253719
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 7.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Unflinchingly Bold

GEOGRAPHIES OF HOME is riveting from start to finish. Loida Maritza Perez, in her evocative, attention-getting prologue alone, establishes a tone of richness and depth. What follows is a story well beyond conventionality. She presents a compelling tale that flows beautifully as if it were an intimate, personalized character analysis of members of a very complex family. The author has structured a work both mystical and convincingly realistic about a severely troubled Dominican family. Perez, in my opinion, is brilliant first, in creating complicated, authentic characters and then telling their stories with graceful, inventive language. The reader shares the horrors of contemporary migration with all its incumbent trauma. However, I suggest that it is the predominance of Caribbean spiritualism that gives this story its illusive, absolutely haunting character. Loida Maritza Perez is masterful at her craft. This novel will stay with you. Very Highly Recommended. Te felicito profundamente, Loida.Alan CambeiraAuthor of AZUCAR! The Story of Sugar (a novel)

It explores relationship of one daughter to her family.

It explores relationship of one daughter to her family. Iliana has gone away to school only to feel responsible for the problem facing her family back home in New York. She quits school to go back to her family and she realizes that some of the problems can not be so easily overcomed. Her father is one of the few male characters in the recent past to be a strong family man and not the typically portrayed latin macho that has no interest in their own family. It is a very fresh view at mental illness, family togetherness, and the need to be your own person.

Geographies of Home

This novel is so beautifully layered with the struggles of adjustment...the meaning of home and how immigrants adjust, successfully and unsuccessfully. I will require this novel next semester when I teach my Freshman Compostion course at the college level. What an insightful, rewarding read.

Haunting Yet Inspiring

I loved this haunting yet inspiring look at a Latino family. I've read some of the more negative reviews on this site, some of which note that it is hard to believe some of the things that motivate key characters, and therefore, dismiss this wonderful work. I completely disagree. Someone on the edge of mental breakdown could very well be pushed pass the point of no return by an event as traumatic as a rape. There are many women who, for reasons most of us will never fathom, stay in physically abusive relationships, so Pasion's story is very believable.I think Loida Maritza Perez has drawn a detailed protrait of a family that exhibits many of the characteristics of immigrant (and other) families everywhere. They suffer heartbreaks and challenges, some of them extreme. They shift and reposition their roles relative to other family members. They have moments when love prevails, and moments when they give in to the baser human emotions and human failiings. But above all, Iliana's family is indeed a loving family, and a fascinating one at that. The struggles they face are very familiar to many of us who are immigrants, and/or who have grown up with particular religious backgrounds. The fact that to some the motivations and actions of what I see as very well-drawn characters are unfamiliar, even strange, is all the more reason why this work is so important. It gives us an opportunity to learn about differences, while at the same time allowing us to glimpse the many similarities that tie all of us together.I highly recommend Geographies of Home, and urge you to look for both the new and the familiar, because they are both there, evoked in beautiful language that will both haunt and inspire you to seek to over your own trials and tribulations with your families.

Long Overdue!!

All I can say is I want more, more, more. One of the brightest latina writer of our time!!From one Dominicana to the other... Thank you Loida Maritza Perez, and I will be sure to look and buy the next one!